Object Oriented History

British Museum and BBC reveal history of the world in 100 objects.

''Without the legein of logic, modern man would have to make do without his automobile. There would be no airplanes, no turbines, no Atomic Energy Commission. Without the logos, of logic, the world would look different.'' - Heidegger, Was Heisst Denken?, 205 (170).

macro-physics! - Latour and plasma

I just made a new post over We Have Never Been blogging on Latour and plasma with some Heideggerian/Hegelian themes lurking about. Link.

Zero books

Just noticed you can pick up three of the zero books for less than 20pounds on amazon UK. With shipping it'd round up to around 20 or so. Well worth it! This works with One Dimensional Woman, Cold World and Capitalist Realism.

One Dimensional Woman

I've got to admit that I'm really enjoying the zero book series that began, I think, with Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism. Although I don't consider myself a Marxist or even all that politically inclined these days I'd probably take more interest, and I think the broader public will too, if left-wing books were written in this kind of style. From Nina Power's One Dimensional Woman:

"What is striking about Elle, Vogue, etc., apart from the relent-lessly contentless writing, was just how confusing they are. Far from whacking you over the head with some specific set of physical ambitions, they create a far more complex set of
anxieties and conflicting demands. Take the 15 pages or so of‘this season’s fashions’– if you were to ‘follow’ all of the trends equally, you’d be a corporate-goth-bohemian-neon-native-American-Indian-casual-office girl."

Book Review Online

Just noticed a book review I wrote a few months back is now online. It is on James Warren's Presocratics which is a fine book on a topic that is often difficult to make accessible. Link.

Previous review of Elden's Speaking Against Number.

Zizek on Heidegger

''I must say that I am more and more convinced that Heidegger, in spite of all the criticism which he deserves, is the philosopher who connects us in the sense that, in a way, almost every other orientation of any serious weight defines itself through some sort of critical relation or distance towards Heidegger.'' - conversations with zizek 28

Jargon Gone Wild!

"In the language of Laclau and Mouffe, this means that Society as an
integrated unity is universally impossible precisely because
of the constitutive excess of the Real qua the unmasterable
negativity upon which every positivization finally depends."

- Conversations with Zizek, 10. Glyn Daly.

Yes!

Best website ever.

The Freiburg Bookshop

This is the proper one with online website and everything (you can order online but watch your wallet!). Here.

Related cool link.

anotherheideggerblog on tour

I'll likely be attending a bunch of conferences this year as I attempt to push my argument (I don't want to bring it onto the blog) into the real world. My first proposal has been accepted so I'll be giving a paper at the Nordic Society for Phenomenology conference 2010 (Stockholm, April 22-24). The paper will be called 'Phenomenology and the Problem of the Ancestral'. If you happen to be at the conference drop me a line and hopefully we'll get a chance to meet up. I'm excited to finally see Malpas, one of the interviewees, in person. My paper proposes a new solution to the aporia of the ancestral tackling it from a spatial rather than temporal direction.

On a related note Speculations auf deutsch: http://www.tausendplateaus.de/2009/12/cfp-speculations-journal-of-object-oriented-ontology/#more-762 (hat tip: Graham Harman).

Graham Harman dictionary of concepts

Here at avoidingthevoid.

Very cool!

On a related note I'll be offline for a few days over the xmas break so e-mail replies will be delayed somewhat.

Copenhagen

Just a really good post by Immanence on Copenhagen.

The bookshop in Freiburg

The bookshop is called Walthari and its on Bertoldstraße. Top shop so do visit it if your there.

Heidegger's Hut

Both Peter Gratton here and Graham Harman here have interesting responses to the Heidegger tidbits post. Here are some of my own pics.

There is actually a better Heidegger book out there with no commentary by Digne Meller Markowitz who took most of the photographs used in Heidegger's Hut. You'll have to travel to Freiburg to buy the book and even then its only really on display in the (amazing) semi-antiquarian bookstore near the University. My friend spent 600euro in there on Heidegger books so be careful. For non-Heideggerians one can find all kinds of other things from first edition Rilke to the new Sloterdijk (so worth visiting anyway).

Of course the real issue being discussed here is Heideggerians and the hut tends to be a nice way to show that Heideggerians are prone to Romanticism. 'They go to huts'! What next! Nonetheless I do know that going to the hut elicits vastly different reactions: some people are massively envious and some look at you like you've just been to a BNP convention. At the time I suppose my reasoning for visiting the hut was very simple. I was at a language learning course in Freiburg for a month. I had weekends off. I'm working on Heidegger. Therefore I should use a Sunday to make the trip.

I went up on a really sunny day with a bunch of Italians from class and a Japanese girl working on Hegel who just wanted to see what all the fuss was about. We took the bus to Todtnau and emerged massively confused...'is that it?' 'or is it there?' We stumbled into the tourist office which is actually smaller than the hut itself and scanned the obscure information leaflets. No skiing for us we're philosophical tourists [luckily we didn't go to the Rhine or the ghost of Heidegger would have been pissed]. Anyway there are a bunch of books there behind glass but nobody to buy from unless you get there before 1pm but once again we are philosophers so we arrived at around 3pm. So we left the tourist office with the sinking feeling that we wouldn't be able to find it. We hadn't done much research and even a basic knowledge about the youth hostel would have made things easier. Those who have been there will know that the youth hostel offers two roads.

The map outside the tourist office is actually somewhat amusing. You could scan it for days and only figure at after 15 minutes that Heidegger's hut is the little dot in the far right [haha!] corner. We actually took a photo in case we got lost. Then we trudged a lone a few times and took the wrong road once and then took the spun out rundweg before emerging down the steep path and into the hut.

The experience was nice and I certainly think Heidegger scholars should check it out if only to deflate things a little [this would be my problem with the architecture style approach which takes the worst excesses in heidegger such as building dwelling thinking or poetically man dwells and elevates then to the centre of his thought]. I think this approach is enough and after an hour outside the hut you can pretty much get a good sense what the vibe is. To write a book about how the rooms were divided seems a little bit too much for me although I appreciated a couple of the interesting tidbits, as my last post shows, that emerged from Sharr's research - which is, I'm sorry to say, philosophically vacuous [see the footnotes and try not to imagine giving him an D-]. Overall it is as Graham notes a nice book in that Sharr is certainly not guilty, bar one or two points, of mystifying Heidegger- if anything he does a good job at normalizing him down to his bourgeois furniture and weird tics. I should note it is short and readable in an hour or two.

I also had a similar experience to Graham when arriving in Freiburg. I figured there'd at least be some kind of plaque but there is essentially nada. Rather there are some specialist bookshops with his work and his books are available much cheaper than say if you wanted them off Amazon [German editions that is]. You can also find Heidegger postcards, cd recordings etc. but the same applies for Gadamer or Habermas.

If you want to retain the Heidegger mystery probably best not to go there. If you want to move past Heidegger and retain some respect for the man as a thinker whilst getting a strong dose as to why he was so wrong about Germany then do go there.

Heidegger tidbits

From the rather interesting for Heidegger tidbits Heidegger's Hut:

Heidegger sometimes walked the eighteen kilometers to the hut from Freiburg, including eight hundred meters of climb, setting out early in the morning.

Also rather revealing:

There was also a bed in the room. Hung on the wall was a portrait of Friedrich
von Schelling.

I'm glad to find that this remains baffling. This was probably the weirdest thing I found when I was at the hut. It just looks odd especially in real life:

Also important to the philosopher was the star fitted to the well, carved in relief from a cube of timber (fig. 41). It is not known who made this decoration, or how it came to be fixed there, although it seems to date from the early days of the hut. While the star is an emblem with both Christian and Judaic symbolism, Heidegger seems to have considered it a personal motif.57 It stood for the wandering thinker, a bright trace against a dark sky. This carved star bound his work symbolically to the spring which was central to the view from his desk, to the hut life it sustained and the resonances of its unseen origin.

Examined Life

I've been informed that Examined Life finally has a release date of February 23th 2010. It is a great little movie and it is rather shocking there are so few movies like this. Top scenes include Cornel West rapid-talking in the back of a cab and Zizek dressed as a workman discussing ecology. Trailer here.

Response to Graham Harman

I just want to make a quick response to Graham's comments regarding my reading of the Vicarious Causation essay. Before I do I want to announce that I'll be joining the guys over at We Have Never Been Blogging (a Latour centred blog). I hope to truly join in when they hit the speculative realism and object oriented philosophy writers. I think we will read Meillassoux's After Finitude, Harman's Guerrilla Metaphysics, and hopefully The Speculative Turn whenever it appears. I've read After Finitude before but I've never fully got to grips with the later chapters. I had a chance to read Guerrilla Metaphysics on interlibrary loan for a few weeks but I've been gunning for my own copy. Sadly it is usually quite expensive or out of stock unless you buy direct from Open Court so I'll have to pick it up from there soon (post-xmas money wise). I'm also reading Serres' Parasite, Hallward on Badiou, and Zizek's First as Tragedy and then as Farce. So there is quite a bit going on and I'll try to address them as they come. My Latour reading is currently Aramis but when the semester starts I'll take out whatever my library has and try to work my way through them alongside Prince of Networks.

When I claimed that there are real objects in Husserl I did not mean to state that Husserl somehow pre-empts the object oriented approach. These Husserlian real objects are not much different than Kantian things-in-themselves. I was trying to tease out precisely that for Husserl real objects can only ever belong to the correlate. His real objects do however mirror the affectivity behind the unified whole that Harman draws upon but there is, as Harman knows, no escape from the as-structure here. Husserl employs real objects as correlationist arguments (as outlined by Meillassoux: correlationist two-step, correlationist circle). I suppose my critique of the essay is only that it does not stress enough this strange residue of alien objects in Husserl - and in light of Ian Bogost's alien phenomenology there is perhaps more to be said. I'll try to develop this as I think Husserlian alien matter and monads are utterly fascinating however they are not proof that Husserl is a realist - in fact they are probably the best proof we have that he is an idealist through and through.

Regarding aesthetics I remain committed to the idea that aesthetics cannot be first philosophy but to prove this I will need to address the development post-VC and this will take some time. Hopefully I can follow that thread over at We Have Never Been Blogging.

"But if what Ennis means is that I don’t move past Heidegger and Gadamer’s view that all knowing is interpreting, then yes, I’ll gladly sign up for hermeneutics in that sense. I wouldn’t even call that “hermeneutics,” I’d just call it philosophia. Love of wisdom that we will never quite have, not the supposedly already available wisdom found in language, mathemes, natural science, or analyses of “power.”"

Yes. What I was trying to suggest is that object oriented philosophy can be read as a kind of radicalized hermeneutics wherein interpretation is expanded to include all interactions. Since objects have a kind of deflated intentionality (sincerity) then I see no reason why one could not have a hermeneutics of objects. I suppose this means that my own peculiar reading of object oriented ontology could be considered an object hermeneutics. This is why I am so keen to emphasize the connections between phenomenological realism [a common question I get via e-mail is what is an unorthodox phenomenological realism - essentially this means a commitment to the pre-transcendental idealist turn in Husserl - this commitment is complimented perfectly by Harman's realist re-working of Heidegger who is also a transcendental idealist in Being and Time comparing the goals of Being and Time explicitly to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason] and object oriented research. There is a hermeneutics not only of objects but also I think of object oriented ontology - its sources, influences, and technical development. I think Latour is a kind of master hermeneuticist in this regard tying up all the cultural goings-ons but with a respect for the objects that get twisted around in our machinations [see Aramis].

Vicarious Causation: Final Part

[At this stage the vicarious causation posts are rather unwieldy. I'll probably stick them onto a pdf at some stage or amalgamate them into one monster post. This is the final part of the reading. I'll attempt a final review in a week or so when the dust settles and I've mulled over the implications of the essay].

The key to allure is not to take it in the literal sense as a metaphorical or rhetorical argument. Rather Harman’s argument is that allure acts in the same manner as metaphor. Like Lacan’s language-structured unconscious Harman’s allure is structured like a metaphor. A sensual object cannot be separated from its essential qualities: what metaphysically makes them singular. Without these essential qualities one would not be able to think a thing as a unified whole. Even the most detailed phenomenological analysis cannot reach the final kernel by endlessly listing sensual object’s features. When we are sincerely absorbed with a sensual object we are sincerely absorbed with something deeper than just these features. This means phenomenology is somehow limited in its analysis of objects. If however we are somehow able to split off qualities, and make them into accidents, and yet sensual objects nonetheless retain some core then there is some excess in the object such that it can split from its qualities and remain unified. This first separation belonging to the sensual realm Harman thinks must also have a correlate (!) in real objects. Between this separation, a kind of gap, the fuse will occur – the vicarious interaction. We see this gap precisely in the sensual separation and it reveals for the first time the real object in a kind of shadowy sense set against the more directly apprehended presence of sensual objects.
This kind of talk begins to sound thoroughly abstract and deeply metaphysical but Harman thinks it can be elucidated for humans via metaphor. For example in the poetic statement ‘my heart is a furnace’ the sensual object heart draws in furnace qualities and yet does not fuse with them. The heart, as a real object, is something deeper than the present, revealed heart that one encounters. Something withdrawn and not directly encounterable illuminates things (Harman even uses the word animus). This is the fundamental key: sensual features form a sensual object but these are ultimately given life by the withdrawn real object. In a second example beauty achieves something similar. A beautiful object does not equate with the totality of its qualities but has life breathed into it by the real object (might Harman be inverting Plato?). Names also animate a person in this peculiar sense. This is nicely depicted by Harman as a process whereby real objects grab sensual objects apart from another, so that they do not fuse with one another, into its “gravitational orbit” (Collapse II, 220). Things are separated from their qualities in this way – by a pull, an allure from below. This means that it is not only humans who separate things from their qualities but that real objects do this to sensual ones. Hence object oriented ontology.

As far as I can discern what people find truly problematic about Harman’s theory is the idea of allure, that is the distant signalling or call of real objects to one another achieved by pulling sensual qualities into their orbit and animating them such that they create unified sensual objects in the process. This time I will avoid drawing on outside texts and focus on the merits of the essay.
Most phenomenologists will not be startled by Harman’s distinction between real and sensual objects. These objects are both found in Husserl and Heidegger – or one can at least follow where Harman has derived them from radical, possibly reductive, readings of each thinker. Real objects are not much different than the things-in-themselves in terms of their features: they are inaccessible or unencounterable. Husserl calls such objects the hyle or matter that consciousness finds utterly alien and nonetheless manages to make cognitions about. Husserl also develops the idea of monads in his later work and it is about as close as one gets in Husserl to non-ideal objects and rationalist metaphysics on a Leibnizian basis. This connection I will explore in detail elsewhere if people find it interesting enough (and I know that Harman has discussed both Husserl and Leibniz from time to time). Real objects are also akin to Cartesian and Leibnizian objects in that they seem to possess a power, or allure that explains why self-motion occurs and here Harman’s causation is not a million miles away from rationalist metaphysics either. Harman tends to consider his real objects in a Heideggerian sense meaning that they withdraw behind all relations – are more than their relations and nonetheless affect other things via sensual objects.

I think Heidegger can clear a thing or two up here and I must adamantly resist the readings that deny the phenomenological background to this essay. This essay relies ultimately more on phenomenological analysis for its breakthrough than the bold metaphorical turn toward its end. In Heideggerian phenomenology vicarious causation would simply be the process whereby real objects come to life through their sensual counterpart (in other words inverse to Harman’s thesis). That is a human only ever encounters a sensual profile of an object within a referential totality. The object is never here singular. Each use alters it in some way. Yet the object’s ability to remain a unified whole comes from elsewhere – the real object that is being used. Harman’s real objects are the objects not being used that bring together a sensual profile for use in human affairs by holding together its qualities. Harman cuts off the Heidegger ontic-ontological focus and makes this a fundamental feature of how objects always interact – among themselves as it were. If one accepts Husserlian adumbrations and Heideggerian Ereignis then Harman only asks that one extend the logic to objects in themselves and to do this one must use a mediator – in this case metaphor. A mediator is necessary because one can never encounter the real object directly in its interactions meaning that some speculative moves are involved.
How do real objects detect other real objects? Before we proceed one must accept that real objects exist.

A real object is here the withdrawn object that one can never directly encounter (a pretty longstanding theme in post-Kantian philosophy). Then one must accept that this real object has some animating power. This can only be adduced negatively by the incapability of sensual objects to resist being ‘broken up’ in intentionality. Meaning that a sensual object must have a deeper layer, its core, that allows it to remain a unified whole. These objects are one and the same: real and sensual are two sides of one object. Despite this they seem to operate at different layers – the real object is ‘deeper’. The language of depth is misleading and comes about only because the human intentional agent attaches a sense of distance to the depths of real objects because it does not itself encounter this depth. This does not mean that the real objects ‘reside’ or ‘live’ at some deeper level (the lesson of flat ontology). It is deeper only to us – in the sense of the as-structure. The subtle background of space is clearly a Heideggerian-phenomenological notion of space as a process of de-distancing. It is not surprising that Harman would come to include this Heideggerian space and more clarification might be required; that is if I have him right on this point. So with this in mind our object, ‘torn asunder’ and split in four directions, gives its sensual object (the vicar) its distant signal like a coaxial cable. The real object wrapped in the sensual object sends connections that slice across itself (a la the fourfold). This gives us something like immanent causation – real objects within sensual objects creating causation (the self-motion of rationalist metaphysics). Once this immanent causation works it means a real object can ‘poke’ through the sensual one to connect with a real one. This seems to be the nuts and bolts of Harman’s vicarious causation.

So what do find problematic about the essay (first thoughts):

Accepting that real objects exist is the pull of real objects simply a subtle move that ignores Heidegger’s thesis that being is a not being? Does Harman render being (in Heidegger the nothing, the contextualizing background, and other spatially deep ‘metaphors’) equivocal in its double sense of multitude and uncertainty?
In this essay Harman claims to lead us toward object oriented ontology and makes the case for a reduced form of intentionality he calls sincerity or simple absorption.

To what extent are real objects nonetheless reduced to that-which-brings-together-qualities so that a human can encounter the sensual profile of the lover in some indefinable manner? Although Harman has a convincing case for how intentionality can be re-inscribed along these lines it remains to be seen whether one is here working past the human centre. Without a desire for the absolute or mathematical properties one must rely on the power of metaphor to symbolize what occurs in the realm of real objects. There is for object oriented ontology more work to be done on how the subject and the way in which the intentional subject occupies a rather significant place in such an essay.

The claim that aesthetics must be first philosophy does not strike me as convincing and it is hard to know how serious Harman is with this claim. Clearly Harman is not afraid to use rhetoric, metaphor, and ‘litanies’ as philosophical tools but the problem here is that object oriented ontology might be nothing more than a hermeneutics of the object (and not really post-Heideggerian/Gadamerian at all). Since the essay begins with phenomenology and turns toward ontology and metaphysics surely aesthetics remains is way down the list (fourth philosophy?). The provisional results were not achieved by aesthetics – the aesthetic tool simply provided the means by which the insights of a phenomenological-ontological-metaphysics axis could be illuminated.

These are just some provisional thoughts as I come to the end of the essay. I will post a final review where I will attempt to clarify the ideas as succinctly as possible and address the questions that have been offered to me by readers.

Speculations CFP

Here is the Speculations CFP that I just sent out in Philos-L on the rather unlikely chance that readers are not already subscribed:

Speculations: The Journal of Object Oriented Ontology

CALL FOR PAPERS

Speculations invites articles on topics related to object oriented philosophy, speculative realism or post-continental philosophy for its inaugural issue. Articles should not exceed 8000 words and should conform to the author’s guidelines outlined on the website. Submissions can be sent electronically via the journal website or directly to the following e-mail address: speculationsjournal@gmail.com

Speculations is an open-access peer-reviewed journal. The deadline for submissions is February 28th 2010. Issue one is due to be published in early 2010 and will include submissions from Graham Harman, Ian Bogost and Levi Byrant.

Website: http://speculationsjournal.org
Inquiries and submissions can be sent to: speculationsjournal@gmail.com

For further information contact:
Paul John Ennis (Editor): paul.ennis@ucdconnect.ie

IEP entry on Zizek

Nice IEP article on Zizek. I've been reading around trying to find a very basic intro to his thinking, especially his ontology, and this hits the mark. Strictly for those struggling with Zizek. Proper modern folks will probably find it bland/simplistic/etc.

My library...and help need re: Physics/Analytic Phil/and Cog Sci

My library has no copy of Being and Event but pretty much everything else by Badiou. Odd no?

Anyway I'm developing my things to read in the coming months and need help getting nice introduction books to physics, cognitive science and analytic philosophy. For the last two what are the indispensable books one ought to have read and with regards to physics what is good way into the field that won't cause me to throw the book across the room in a fit of confusion?

Object Oriented Resources

I've salvaged all the good information from the object oriented blogging posts. Just some links to publishers, journals, blogs etc. in the object oriented zone. Might need some trimming. If I've missed anything let me know and I'll add it. The post might be a bit breezy as I'm nursing a severe hangover. I'll return to the post and update it tomorrow.

There are three journals that could be said to be object oriented friendly. The first is Speculations which is not yet up and running but will be the first journal dedicated to object oriented philosophy: Speculations: The Journal of Object Oriented Philosophy The people at Collapse have published essays by Graham Harman although it does not look like this relationship will or was meant to last. Finally there is Pli which publishes occasional work from within speculative realism but is generally just good at publishing work at the cutting edge of continental philosophy with a slight emphasis on Badiou/Deleuze etc. as opposed to phenomenology.

As for publishers Harman has published with Re:Press and Zero Books and my suspicion is that this they will serve as the main publisher of object oriented philosophy for the foreseeable future.
I have my own book coming out with Zero which includes interviews by all three object oriented thinkers here (Harman), here (Bogost) and here (Bryant).

There is a massive amount of speculative realism blogs and a number of areas that list them and so I will focus on the three object oriented blogs. The first is Graham Harman's blog Object Oriented Philosophy and it tends to be a mix of advice posts, irreverent musings, travel report and philosophical discussion. It is also where one is most likely to hear object oriented related news.

Levi Byrant's blog Larval Subjects is an explicitly theoretical blog and the posts tend to be fairly long and somewhat jargon laden for those without a theory background. That being said we have in Levi's blog a case someone developing their own version of object oriented philosophy (or ontology for Levi) in real-time.

Ian Bogost's blog hosts some interesting object oriented discussion and the broader website puts most philosopher's sites to shame. Bogost is particularly good at explaining object oriented philosophy in a direct, clear manner.

Reading wise it is worth starting with Meillassoux's After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency for the critique of correlationism. Obviously all of Harman's work matters for an aspiring object oriented philosopher. I recommend beginning with Tool-Being before moving onto Guerrilla Metaphysics. I'd take a quick detour into the 'Vicarious Causation' essay (found in Collapse II) before reading the (free and online) Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics - in particular the second part. All of these are written in an accessible style excepting some necessary excursions into Heideggerian in the first few chapters of Tool-Being.

Related reading is Bruno Latour himself. My personal choice would be We Have Never Been Modern. You can found more Latourness over at We Have Never Been Blogging.

Bogost's work is is not explicitly object oriented in the technical sense (yet) but Unit Operations is an awesome read and has the effect of embarrassing one for hiding too much in the ivory theory. It also deals seriously with a topic that is sorely neglected i.e. videogame theory.

In the coming months we can expect a book from Levi Bryant provisionally called The Democracy of Objects. Luckily Levi will also have an essay in the all-round awesome collection of essays The Speculative Turn.

Vicarious Causation Part V

I'm coming close to the end of this reading. All that is left is the final section on allure and the rather startling remarks on first philosophy as aesthetics. I know Graham expressed some doubts about the number of people reading this essay but it has helped clarify things immensely for me.

Harman defines ontology as focusing on the “basic structural features shared by all objects” (Collapse II, 204) or ontology is about the universal structures shared by all objects. This is a definitively phenomenological approach. Harman then defines metaphysics as focusing on “the fundamental traits of specific types of entities” (Collapse II, 204) or to focus on the particular features that makes an object distinct. Harman extends beyond the Husserlian/Heideggerian domain here in that neither thinker engages these traits in a manner separate from the first ontological approach. So far Harman has been engaged in structural ontology delineating the features (the jigsaw puzzle) shared by all objects. Alongside the various structures we have encountered Harman adds space and time since no object is exempt from space and time structurally (space and time here broadly conceived). Moving toward metaphysics Harman has a broad scope in mind including not only the traditionally important topics that can be examined in their singularity, and upon which most philosophy depends for its content, but expands the scope to include all objects. Football stadiums can be the object of metaphysical engagement in precisely the same way language can.

The “specific reason” (Collapse II, 205) for Harman’s ontological-metaphysical distinction is to reveal that intentionality can be, ontologically, a basic structural feature, or a universal feature, of all objects or put differently intentionality is not a metaphysical property belonging to one being called the human being. This has the further implication of making the sensual world something more than the occurrence of sensual profiles or objects within human intentionality. This means, quite radically, that the intention of a sensual feature could be experienced or at least encountered by a non-human intention. This requires that one accept Harman’s deflated, or a critic might say inflated, interpretation of intentionality as sincerity or simple absorption.

This “rudimentary” (Collapse II, 205) form of intentionality is essentially, that is ontologically, contact between real and sensual objects. It is important to keep the deflated sense of intentionality in mind when discussing Harman since one can easily be lead to think that intentionality is meant in its broadest sense, the epistemologically complex intentionality of human cognition, and so one might easily conclude that Harman is engaged in panpsychism – a critique he pre-empts. More to the point this deflated sense of intentionality allows one to see that Harman’s sincere contact between objects is not meant in an anthropomorphizing sense. Harman is not attributing epistemological intentionality (human cognition) to objects. This does not mean that his conception of intentionality is problematic but we can at least move beyond the most likely critique.

Harman makes an important claim next: “We must ignore the usual connotations of sensuality and fix our gaze on a more primitive layer of the cosmos” (Collapse II, 206). Here I think we can go some way to dispelling the idea that Harman is projecting sensuous qualities upon exotic objects – at least from the strictly philosophical mode. The question of the aesthetic employment of exotic metaphors is a different issue to be addressed later in the round-up. Within the orientalist lens one might also question the notion of a “primitive layer” but this too is a major theme of Western philosophical thinking from Schelling to Heidegger (and already problematic for Jacobi in his depiction of German idealism as a step toward emptiness/nothingness). Of course we have already encountered the primitive layer in this essay when Harman discussed the subterranean realm of real objects and readers of Heidegger will spot the connection with Heidegger’s referential totality or background (a background of nothingness). I must add that Harman has earlier rejected my equation of the subterranean realm as akin to the Latourian plasma.
Harman moves toward an example of an object oriented metaphysics. In his example the real object is a marble. Real objects occupy a space in reality interacting with sensual objects which allow them to be (to make connections) since real objects cannot interact with each other because they do not give off a sensual profile for other real objects to be sincerely absorbed with. The real objects are always withdrawn from view but their space remains a shared space on the open plane of reality – it is just that the “primitive layer” (Collapse II, 206 my italics) requires a language of distance for us to comprehend it. Upon this even layer real objects are “sincerely absorbed with sensual objects” (Collapse II, 206). The landscape of real objects is primitive only in that this basic intentionality holds for all objects in all instances – a strict ontology that holds for marbles as much as humans. Humans, to address the charge of anti-humanism, remain here epistemologically complex and this is their particular feature i.e. their metaphysical feature that identifies them as human.

Harman notes that the marbles of his example “are perfectly capable of distinguishing between the table and the contiguous relational environment...” (Collapse II, 206). This is the kind of quote that could easily be taken out of context and look rather absurd. I admit that within this essay the claim is not fully justified but I would add the proviso that it becomes much clearer within the context of Tool-Being and Guerrilla Metaphysics. All that is required here is that the real marble be sincerely absorbed in the table – it is not the case that the marble knows or recognizes that it is a table (since it is we who name tables) although Harman occasionally drifts toward this kind of description. The point is that in some deeply primitive sense the marble distinguishes the table from the “contiguous relational environment” (Collapse II, 206). If marbles did not do this then it is difficult to imagine how the relations could occur or how causation could occur since all would seemingly melt together or objects would not ‘know’ what to do. Here we are in troubling waters and we are reminded of Schelling’s warning that it is precisely in our philosophical separation, the basis of philosophical thinking, that one re-asserts causation from our end. Harman boldly bypasses the idealist deadlock insisting that causation must be a feature of the world but this requires a certain rejection of idealist insight mixed with the (German) idealist insistence that speculation is what makes us free. The dialectic for Harman is a reversed idealism turning Jacobi’s warning on its head by insisting that speculation is not an inherently negative exercise leading toward nothingness but precisely a positive exercise re-inscribing ‘nothing’ in the world that is not already present (pitting him against Heidegger once again – the contemporary thinker of nothingness and the inertness of nature without man).

Harman attributes to objects a certain distinguishing power bringing him closer to the rationalist (Cartesian/Leibnizian) belief that objects have self-motion or power. Despite human manipulation of objects, especially manipulation designed to alter some sensual feature of the table (the intentional/sensual table), the marble still looks to be engaged in some kind of sincere absorption with the table meaning that objects can distinguish between the core object at the other end and its shifting features (including the surrounding relations). The question then is whether the real object is somehow able to distinguish between the table in some generalized substantial (ontological) sense or whether it can establish that the table has “essential qualities” (Collapse II, 207). This will be the problem that brings the essay to its conclusion and the answer will be ‘allure’.
Before we enter this last, somewhat provisional, section we will recap. A real object inhabits a landscape or space populated by sensual objects. In this space real objects and sensual objects interact with one another producing “real connections” (Collapse II, 207). It is this vicarious process that allows real objects to interact with other real objects – such is the core insight of the essay. The real object/sensual object landscape generates vicarious connections between real objects outside this “internal space” (Collapse II, 207). This endless plastering over the subterranean depths allows a real object and sensual one to short circuit their own internal space by ‘calling’ a real objects from the subterranean depths to make a vicarious connection resulting in the seamless emergence of “a new unified whole” (Collapse II, 208).

New blogs

Just wanted to point people to a rather interesting Heidegger blog called Seynsgeschichte and to amend the lack of a link to the excellent Planomenology. Some new blogs: Speculative Humbug and Networkologies.

Ian Bogost defines OOO (for the layman)

I quite like Ian's short definition of OOO designed to reach a non-philosophical audience. Here is the definition:

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology ("OOO" for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, DVD players, cotton, bonobos, sandstone, and Harry Potter, for example. In particular, OOO rejects the claims that human experience rests at the center of philosophy, and that things can be understood by how they appear to us. In place of science alone, OOO uses speculation to characterize how objects exist and interact.

I'm just home from Germany and I have a few posts planned (written on the plane):
1) The next section of the Vicarious Causation reading bringing me to the final section
2) A quick note on my reaction to the Zizek interview (a post I feel the need to atone for)
3) Some thoughts on Brassier (generally positive)
4) A summation of where I am with OOO personally and a coming-to-terms with its status and possible directions.

Off to Freiburg

I'm off to Freiburg for a week. This means I'm unlikely to post anything until I get back or if I do it'll be whimsical refections on things I'm doing in Freiburg. I'm also going to try complete my reading of Harman's essay on causation and hopefully by the time I get back I can write it up.

Vicarious Causation Parts I-IV

Here are the first four sections of my reading of Graham Harman's essay Vicarious Causation. This brings us up until section 3 of the essay on ontology and metaphysics. Part I, Part II and Part III. Part four is offered for the first time here.

In his essay on causation Harman begins by talking about the space of real objects – a thoroughly metaphysical project that draws on Husserl and Heidegger. Whereas there is a case to be made for Harman as a neo-Heideggerian in Tool-Being the same cannot be said of his development after Guerrilla Metaphysics [We might cheekily call this Harman's Kehre!]Nonetheless he draws heavily in the beginning on both Husserl and Heidegger. In Husserl Harman locates ideal objects and calls them sensuous objects for reasons we will come to see later. In Heidegger Harman finds real objects albeit real objects glimpsed through Heidegger’s tool-analysis but absent in a sense from Heidegger’s own concerns. For Harman Heidegger shows that the theoretical approach to objects is derivative from our practical concern with them but Heidegger overlooks that the objects of practical concern are not therefore illuminated in their proper depths.

Heidegger does restore to objects a certain practicality but this is not the same as grasping what objects are 'fully'. Someone engaged in practical concern with an object is just as much in the dark about the object, metaphysically, as the scientist: “We distort when we see, and distort when we use” (Collapse II, 193). The essence of the object is not fully explicated in practical concern setting Harman in direct contradiction with Heidegger’s fundamental thesis regarding objects.

At this point one might say that Harman is simply reiterating a transcendental point about the radical unknowability of objects. Yet Harman extends this unknowability to object-object interactions. In much the same way that a human cannot exhaust the possibilities of an object so too objects cannot exhaust the possibilities of other objects. To say that they do would be to state that relationality is the primary way in which things are unfolded. All relations have a distortive influence not only human relations. In this move Harman radicalizes Heidegger’s ‘readiness-to-hand’. Readiness-to-hand is not to grasp something thematically as useful nor is it that things are things in so much as they are useful. It also means, and at this point it is unclear whether Harman sees this in a twofold sense, that objects have hidden depths that other objects require, necessarily, in order to ‘come about’. Yet this reliance can never completely exhaust these depths. Objects move constantly, in an almost Hegelian sense, like a carousel of possibilities that never ends.

For Harman the ‘breakdown’ that exposes the referential totality is not simply the illumination of the world as an interconnected concernful place but the revelation that objects have depths no human engagement can plumb. The nothingness at the heart of Dasein is shown to be a fundamental feature of existence as such cutting through the anthropocentric baggage of Heidegger’s existential analytic. In Harman’s sense objects are more than their relations but this excess is a withdrawal to somewhere – a depth to objects that must be explored. The background of Heidegger’s referential totality is shown to be limited or only part of the picture. A further background exists, a Latourian ‘plasma,’ consisting of objects shading into momentary contact with other objects and humans before flitting back into the background. Harman now shifts the emphasis to Husserl and more specifically back to the phenomenal realm or “the space of purest ideality” (Collapse II, 194).


In Husserl there is no realm of real objects. There is only the ideal or phenomenal realm. The objects of the phenomenal realm are not real objects but they are for Harman “objects nonetheless…” (Collapse II, 194). Ideal objects do not have hidden depths in the same sense as real objects. They are encountered directly as affective (in perception or in the intentional act). They induce moods and they sparkle with qualities. They are the objects of perception. Here Harman amalgamates Husserlian ideal objects and Heideggerian real objects into one 'thing' but posits that any object has two faces: its real and its sensual/ideal side. Its real side cannot be confronted directly and is characterized by withdrawal and its ideal side confronts us – draws itself forward as encounter-able. The crucial difference between them is that the real object always withdraws to depths unknowable whereas the ideal object can retain more “possible perceptions” and nonetheless appear as a totality (Collapse II, 194). [On this point Harman is thoroughly Husserlian]. In contrast to the swirling depths of real objects sensuous objects wear their swirling potentiality openly.

Here we enter into Harman’s own metaphysics. For Harman “real objects never touch directly” (Collapse II, 194). Real objects do not touch directly because they belong primarily to a background where relationality is not their proper mode of existence. Whatever real objects are they are not to be defined as things that interact. Rather they are better characterized as things that withdraw. They are precisely the objects that reside ‘behind’ relationality and all specific relations. Since real objects do not interact with the sensual profiles of other real objects, as ideal objects do with one another, then whatever causation they engage in is either unknowable (not Harman’s position) or vicarious (Harman’s position). They must be vicarious because only the ideal or phenomenal realm provides objects with the space of ideality in which their swirling profiles can interact providing the basis for inter-relations. Harman now asks why sensual objects do not meld together in perceptual experience since they occur side by side in perceptual experience. He posits that there must be something between them – a kind of “buffered causation” (Collapse II, 194)

At this point Harman’s thesis is that there is the space of real objects where no causation occurs and the pure space of ideality where causation occurs. Harman reverses the standard view that surface is form and depth is causation such that causation occurs on the surface (ideal realm of sensuous objects) and form resides in the depths (space of real objects). The metaphysical question is how do real objects emerge from out of their formal depths onto the surface into their ideal causal interactions? In a more particular sense how do they manage to do so when they can never interact with other real objects directly?

Harman shifts up a gear or two is the second section of this paper (‘A Jigsaw Puzzle’). Harman argues that for Husserl intentionality is “both one and two” (Collapse II, 197). There is both (1) the “unified relation” (the entire intentional realm broader than myself and the intended ) (2) within this unified relation there remains two distinct objects utterly distinct from one another but both belonging within the unified whole. Harman views the two objects within the unified relation as residing on its interior or as I would personally wager the objects reside in the space of the unified whole (however such intentional wholes are always only chunks that can be broken up).

The ‘I’ is real and the tree is sensual or ideal. In the intentional act the real 'I' is engaging with the sensual profile of the tree and is not, as when it is gazed upon, itself sensual. On the other hand the tree although within an intention does not inhabit the intention as the ‘I’ does (i.e. by engaging a sensual profile). Rather the tree, as a real object, opts out receding behind the relation – being more than the relation. The intentional whole is also real and not sensual since it does not rely on the relation – it would occur regardless of whether objects belonged to it or not. In other words the intentional whole is not defined by its relations making it real and not sensual.

At this point one has the intentional whole which is real, the ‘I’ which is also real and within the intentional whole (‘inside’ it) and the ideal or sensual tree which is also inside. There is also the real true, receding behind the relation, that nonetheless manages to exist outside the relation and manages to “…affect it along avenues still unknown” (Collapse II, 198).


At this stage we have four objects, the real intention inhabited by a real I and a sensual tree. There is also the real tree outside the intention but it is nonetheless capable of affecting the intention. The sensual tree is never encountered in an essential sense but is “...encrusted with various sorts of noise” (Collapse II, 198). This noise Harman calls black noise and black noise is characterized by being highly structured in perception i.e. such black noise contributes to the making up of a whole sensual object one can encounter rather than some chaotic swirl of formless and changing attributes. There are three varieties of black noise:

1. The sensual tree has essential qualities necessary for the intentional subject to make sense of it as an object.

2. The sensual tree also has accidental features.

3. The relations that the tree has to other objects that also belong to the intention.

Harman thinks there are five relations that occur between sensual objects in this third sense:

(1) Containment: the intentional whole that the real I and the sensual tree inhabit.

(2) Contiguity: sensual objects can lie beside each other and not affect one another although sometimes they can meld together to create a new object. This means that the other objects around the tree can be switched around without distorting the identity of the tree. The identity of the tree is not dependent upon its neighbours: that is the tree is more than its relations.

(3) Sincerity: When one is absorbed in the intention toward the tree the sensual tree is contained in the intentional whole. As a real object I am actually engaged with the tree but the same cannot be said for the sensual tree.

(4) Connection: Although within the intention a real object and a sensual object can interact it is not a connection between real objects. Sensual objects do not interact at all. The intention as such requires real objects to occur meaning that there must be some way real objects interact but it must be indirect and it must be the foundation for the intention. [Harman uses the intentional whole to show that what occurs within the intentional whole cannot explain how real objects interact since real objects do not interact within any intentional whole.] Hence there must be some deeper space prior to the intention comprised of real objects with some affective power but whose affectivity is distributed vicariously: “...a real object is born from the connection of other real objects, through unknown vicarious means” (Collapse II, 200).

(5) No relation at all: At the level of real objects there is no direct contact and generally any contact, even vicariously, is rare between most objects. We can see this through Harman’s example that the oxygen that sustains me comes from the real tree and not from my perception of the sensual tree. Whatever the sensual tree is it is only in so much as it is ‘alive’ within the intention and its relations are only occurring in this sensual mode; also within the intention.
Although Harman has discussed developing upon these relations we have here the five relations that are always at work in the world between objects.

This leads Harman to another list of features (and here we might add a criticism of the listing which seems to be getting unwieldy but hopefully the diagrams will sort that out) this time of causation: causation is vicarious, asymmetrical, and buffered. Causation is vicarious in that no two objects ever come into direct contact – rather they do so via an indirect mediation and this mediation occurs at the sensual level but the mediation occurs “on the interior of some other entity” although this final part I cannot unpack unless the interior here refers to some form of intentional whole or intention (Collapse II, 200). The asymmetrical aspect refers to the earliest insight that at first and interaction is always between a real and sensual object as when the ‘I’ earlier was a real object interacting with a sensual tree. Buffered we also encountered earlier as the somewhat mysterious way in which things do not seem to fuse together meaning that some kind of buffer exists.

All unified objects; that is objects unified within an intention, are the meeting place of two objects, sensual and real, that meet asymmetrically. The sensual object Harman calls the sensual vicar. The sensual vicar is the mediator between the real object and another real object but since no two real objects can interact the mediator is necessary. The idea is actually rather simple: real and sensual objects, which are in contact, allow for a real object occurring within an intentional whole to connect with a real object which is outside the intentional whole. Harman’s theory of causation is the theory as to how real objects, one within an intention and one not, affect one another. The event or occasion that allows for this to happen is vicarious in that it occurs between the sensual mediator. It is not too far from Heidegger’s event of appropriation wherein the occurrence of events is that between two things mediated by being such that each object appropriates the other via being. The sensual object creates a buffering occasion which can be thought of the space between two objects (thought here in a truly metaphysical spatiality) that cannot touch since they belong to unknown depths – are vacuum packed. Harman’s theory is a theory of how events (real object-object interactions) occur or occasion.

This leads Harman to proclaim five kinds of objects: the intentional whole, the real object (the ‘I’), the real tree and the sensual tree, and sensual black noise. Objects occasion in three ways: buffering, asymmetry, and vicarious causation. Three kinds of black noise exist: qualities, accidents, and relations. This sets up Harman’s provisional picture of reality and all that remains is to discuss how they work: “These sorts of problems are the subject matter of object oriented philosophy: the inevitable mutant offspring of Husserl’s intentional objects and Heidegger’s real ones” (Collapse II, 202).

God has receded to the edges of space

I've been finding a spate of 'deep web' or 'deep space' articles and blog posts these days. As this recent Guardian article informs us the deep web is a kind of techno-deep-sea...push a rock over and who knows what will scurry out. As immanence recently noted, although I can't find the particular post, even Harman's objects seem to act like deep-sea creatures shimmering forth before disappearing into unknowable subterranean depths. The negative image of this would be 'ponzai' critique of object oriented philosophy as series of empty gestures made too quickly to be grasped.

Dark vitalism (or Morton's dark ecology) in contrast to plain old deep ecology does not make nature sacred. In the Žižek article that kicked off the nature discussion it is difficult not to notice a certain disgust with nature (a motif picked up here and here). Yet I do not think Žižek is disgusted with nature as such but Nature as Natur- a la German Idealism(the Hegelian Natur as Objekt and not Gegenstand). In the young Hegel (the theological Hegel) nature is expropriated by the Jews as that which is not sacred. With the return of God as embodied flesh (Jesus) the chasm is fulfilled and the rift is healed. The contemporary idea of nature, the pre-Žižekian nature, beloved by deep ecology and environmentalism is now functioning in the opposite direction...God has withdrawn so nature must be made sacred.

Now it might be possible that the attempt to understand nature in vitalist terms does this at the micro level (of life on earth which have become relatively small (finite) in our meta-physical discourse) but at the macro level the edges of the Universe allow one to discuss something distinctly outside (where the Jewish God resided for Hegel mediated only by Moses and not directly encountered otherwise; the Jewish God is the transcendent aspect he links up to the Jewish-Kantian nexus). This 'power' pinches from outside - puncturing our universe from some strange depth - and is presumably not something one can attribute to the gap filled in by subjectivity (although I will need help here from Žižekians to know if this works).

Of course Hegel's attitude to Nature is itself complicated. Nature is Idea-outside-itself and its form is Space (as in space-time)and here Hegel is perhaps closer to our current conception of Nature at the macro-scale. Macro-Nature bypasses our temporality, Idea-in-and-for-itself (History), and Heidegger is here correct that philosophy today is a return to physics (or physics is our metaphysics). At this properly grand scale physics leaves us behind - leaving us feeling a little unvital. They seem to be enact deep-thinking.

God has receded to the edges of space never to be witnessed directly but encountered through the mediation of the Hubble telescope.